Junior Year by Tran

Junior Year by Tran - July 2024 Scholarship Essay

The infamous quote, “junior year will be the hardest year of your high school career”, hit me cold and hard. I quickly understood the depths of this quote during the early months of this year. The stress of AP exams, ACTs, and complicating class work began crumbling down on top of each other. Though I knew the difficulty of this school year was inevitable, I thought I was doing well the first semester. To be fair, I was doing exceptionally well. However, when the second semester hit, things sort of started to spiral out of my control. I saw changes to my grades and a change in myself. Though I thought junior year would surely be the year where I truly plummet academically, I learned the special lesson that there will always be a light at the end of the tunnel.
Grades have always been a big topic in my family. School came naturally to me growing up, and it wasn’t until junior year where I started to see a noticeable change in the difficulty of the learning content and the grades I was receiving. Thinking that I prepared thoroughly for a test and seeing that I completely bombed it instead was a huge hit to the chest. Seeing my grades get lower and lower affected my mental and physical health. Thinking that it was virtually impossible for my grades to see a better day, it took a large toll on my motivation to do school and my general happiness. My siblings were unintentionally helpful during this time. Seeing them excitedly exclaim their successes to my parents made me motivated to pick myself up and work towards my own successes. Though I was in a tough time in my life, I sought to make my life better and work towards being the best person I could. I began retaking the past tests I had done poorly on and thoroughly studied for before each and every test. I learned that it was possible to get myself out of a bad place even when I thought it was the absolute end; I learned that there is always a way to make a good ending out of a bad situation.
From a young age, I was always worried about how my life would play out. Whether I’d get a well-paying job, whether I’d get into medical school, or whether or not my parents would be proud of me, I was always thinking about my future. Though I cannot necessarily decide or see the fate of my future, I surely can see that I am on the right track. If I had not persevered through my downfalls or pushed through the tough times, I would not be where I am today. I would not be the girl who finished junior year with all A’s, the girl who passed all of her AP exams, and the girl who is very content and proud of where she has made it. With this lesson, I will take it with me and persist through my last year of high school, through college, and into my future journeys. I will remember all of the endeavors I faced during junior year when I am presented a rough patch in the future. I will remember that there is always a light at the end of the tunnel even if the tunnel is pitch black and hard to navigate, there will always be a positive outcome.